A Laywoman's Lectionary: The Moon Sets at Easter - For the Second Second of Easter (4/3/05)

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.

In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials, so that the genuineness of your faith--being more precious than gold that, though perishable, is tested by fire--may be found to result in praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.
Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls. (1 Peter 1:3-9) [NRSV]

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How extraordinarily fitting, that this particular passage from the first letter of Peter should be one of the texts for tomorrow, as Pope John Paul II, today's "Peter," the rock upon which Christ has built his church, passes from this world to the next.

I haven't been here for awhile. Life often catches up with me early in the year, and I tend to miss much of Lent as I contend with what seems like the endlessness of winter. I usually emerge from my mental cave just in time for Easter, and then retreat again almost immediately as the clouds and snow return (which they have done with a vengeance this morning).
This year has been a bit different. While winter made its inevitable journey through the northern hemisphere, my stepmother was making a pilgrimmage of her own as cancer invaded her body. One morning a few weeks ago, I sat with her for the last half- hour of her earthly life. It was the first time that I had been with someone at the end of this journey. There were no trumpets, no angels, no mists in the wee hours of the morning. Her face did not break into recognition as she made the transition, and the room did not fill with light.

But as I sat there, as she died and for quite awhile afterward, I was sure that I was in another dimension of existence, somewhere between this world and another one. It was a powerful experience of place and not-place, of time and not-time.

It was indeed a sense of an entryway into an "imperishable inheritance", a passageway under the "protection of the power of God." The Pope must be in that place now, "receiving the outcome of a faith" that has supported one of the strongest voices of our time.

A Laywoman's Lectionary: Scarcity and Abundance - For the First Sunday in Lent (2/13/05)

Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was famished. The tempter came and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread." But he answered, "It is written, 'One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.'"

Then the devil took him to the holy city and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, 'He will command his angels concerning you,' and 'On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.'" Jesus said to him, "Again it is written, 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'"

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; and he said to him, "All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me." Jesus said to him, "Away with you, Satan! for it is written, 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'" Then the devil left him, and suddenly angels came and waited on him. (Matthew 4:1-11) [NRSV]

Many of us have issues with food. Sometimes such difficult ones that we think that forty days without would be easier than going on Weight Watchers. People who struggle with eating disorders are sometimes heard to wish that their problem was instead alcohol, or cigarette smoking -- it seems that it would be easier to eliminate something completely from our lives than to have to monitor it judiciously. But the real truth is that we know that 40 days without food would be close to impossible and, definitely, impossibly dangerous. We know that so well that, unless we are really ill, we don't even entertain the idea. It's more likely that we'll respond as I did the other day, when entering a newly renovated bakery. The sign above the door says, "Man CAN live on bread alone!" But woman, I thought, needs a Margarita, too.

So why doesn't a hungry Jesus just turn those stones to bread?

How about testing God to care for us? How many bargains have you made with God? I started when I was a little girl, an incipient atheist in the making. "God, " I would say as I lay in bed at night, "prove yourself. Just move that table over there. Just a couple of inches. I need a sign!" As I got older and moved into the wretchedness of what passed for adolescence in my life, I gave up hope that there would ever be a sign. I threw myself repeatedly into the way of danger without ever a thought that there was anyone to protect me.

But Jesus had every reason to be confident. Why didn't he grab that opportunity to show off the power of God?

And finally, the big one. The whole world. Anything you want. I spend a lot of time thinking about things I want. A redecorated downstairs. Functional plumbing in the spare bathroom. A bigger yard. A hot tub. A entirely different yard for the hot tub -- one several hundred miles away where it's sunny ALL WINTER. My stepmother's recovery. My children's guaranteed health and safety. The Mastercard bill paid off. No more emotional trauma. A month in Italy and one in France. An organized basement. A full night's sleep.

So why didn't Jesus want all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor?

I've been taking a class on the 13th-14th century German mystic Meister Eckhart and last night some of our discussion revolved around issues of scarcity and abundance. What do we think we need? What do we cling to? Why?

The answer to the "Why?" seems to be a simply and yet terribly complex one: fear. We fear scarcity. We fear, ultimately, scarcity of love, of God's love. In a passage from a book called Beauty by an author new to me, John O'Donohue, our instructor read (and I have to paraphrase here): Unless we say "Yes" to God's love, we operate out of a sense of scarcity and begin to back off and protect ourselves.

What we do, it seems to me, is look for every opportunity to turn stones to bread, to prove that we are safe, and to take over the world -- as least as much of it as we personally think we need.

"Sometimes," says O'Donohue, " the urgency of our hunger blinds us to the fact that we're already at the feast."

That's what Jesus knew -- that he was already there. Hungry and tired and lonely and no doubt in need of a bath, he knew that he was in the midst of the abundance of his father's love. The things to which one would expect a king to be attached -- rich food, a show of power, command over all that lay before him -- were of no significance to him. They were nothing but signs of scarcity, of our eagerness to fill our lives with emptiness and overlook the abundance of the present moment.

It would be a good thing if, for Lent, I could focus on the abundance of the present moment. The honest truth, though, is that it's a clear night out there, with Orion and an exact half-moon starkly etched into the sky, and I wish there were a hot tub on the back porch.

A Laywoman's Lectionary: Thin Places - For the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Transfiguration Sunday) (2/6/05)

Thin Places - For the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Transfiguration Sunday) (2/6/05)
Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white.

Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. Then Peter said to Jesus, "Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah."

While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, "This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!"
When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, "Get up and do not be afraid." And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.

As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus ordered them, "Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead." (Matthew 17:1-9)[NRSV]

It was September of 1981 and we had hiked all the way from Glenns Lake to Stoney Indian Lake in Glacier Park. According to the brief note in my photographic journal, the trek UP over Stoney Indian Pass was so challenging that we were too exhausted to take many pictures. I did manage to note, however, that we had seen a dipper -- a small mountain bird that walks upstream, bobbing up and down in icy mountain flows. Those of you who are birders and maintain life lists will recognize a dipper as something of a big deal, at least for someone from Ohio -- a state with no icy mountain rivers and, therefore, no dippers.

At the end of the day, we collapsed into Stoney Indian Campground, a spot so isolated that we had seen no other hikers all day and would see none until the next evening. Its loneliness was compounded by its treelessness, meaning that it offered no place from which to hang food packs out of the reach of bears.

When you pack into the Glacier backcountry, the presence of grizzly bears dominates your consciousness. You waiver endlessly between a hopeful longing to see one of those magnificent creatures with the silver-tipped fur rise from the ground (in the distance, of course) and a heart-thumping terror that one will choose your campsite as its evening dining facility, leaving no evidence that you were ever there. Needless to say, Stoney Indian, utterly devoid of human artifacts, was at once exhilarating and nerve-wracking.

Perhaps it was the isolation and tension of the place. Perhaps it was the exhaustion from the hike. Perhaps it was the joyful little dipper. But, trite as it seems, I think that it was the view from Stomey Indian that convinced me, maybe for the first time in my life, of the existence of God as Creator and Spirit. As the sun began to set, the puffs of white clouds cast long shadows across the granite mountains, which rise well above the tree line. The mountains stretched and reached and slid across the horizon in shades of purple and gold and gray. The air was still and the space was silent. A space wide and wild enough for God. God may have walked in a garden in the cool of one evening, but I think that God strode across mountains in the twilight of others.

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I originally wrote what's above for our church's Lenten devotional booklet last year.

"All things that rise must converge." So Flannery O'Connor titled a short story, although if she borrowed the title from someone else, I can't remember.

Last Sunday, our pastor began to preach on the "thin places." I was baffled for a few minutes, wondering why her theme sounded so familiar. Then she referenced Marcus Borg's description of the thin places, those places on earth where it seems, somehow, that God is much closer than in our usual experience. At that point I knew that I must have heard Marcus Borg himself speak about the thin places,at Chautauqua one summer. (Chautuauqa itself is often one of the thin places.)

Then Sunday evening I picked up the little book that's making the rounds at church for this year's Lenten season: Celtic Prayers from Iona by J. Philip Newell. Iona is a very small island off the west coast of Scotland, where Celtic Christianity was born for Ireland the sixth century. Iona has been described by George MacLeod, the founder of its twentieth century community, as " 'a thin place', in which the material realm is only thinly separated from the spiritual."

This entry represents my own first experience of a "thin place." It seemed appropriate for the day on which the story of the Transfiguration appears in the lectionary texts.

A Laywoman's Lectionary: Poor In Spirit: For the Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time (1/30/05)

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you." (Matthew 5:1-12) [NRSV]

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That was quick. Last week Jesus was calling his disciples, and already he is immersed in his ministry of teaching. As far as the church year is concerned, there's no time to waste between his search for companions and his plunge into the substance of his work.

The first one is the hardest, and that's what I've been thinking about this week, as I tried to plan what to write here. For many years, I found the Luke version, the concrete "Blessed are the poor," was much easier to comprehend. Not that it's easy to understand why literal, monetary, material poverty should exist, either in God's plan or on a planet so rich in resources. But it is easier to talk about poverty as a concrete concept than poverty as a spiritual concept.

It does seem to seep into our consciousness though. I think that now, in my fifties, I can comprehend spiritual poverty in ways that were outside my grasp a decade ago. I can't claim advancing maturity or depth of understanding as the reason; I can only say that circumstances have required me to abandon certain goals and ideals that I thought were unshakable, as necessary to my existence as breathing. All gone now. Things that most other people in my small world have been able to take for granted evaporated for me, suddenly and with no warning. All gone now.

When hopes and dreams that you have worked for fall away, you get two choices. You can stand there, screaming and crying and begging to get them back, resisting with all your being the new path laid before you. Or you can wipe your eyes and set your shoulders straight and let the past go. We usually talk about this process as one of "detachment," although one of my sons, who has studied a bit of East Asian thought and history, tells me that "un-attachment" would be a more appropriate phraseology.

I'm not there yet. I can't talk about spiritual poverty with more than the most glancing acquaintance with the consequences it might bring. But even that glancing acquaintance is an expereince that we resist, as individuals who want what we want, and as a culture that wants more all the time. Perhaps most of us experience it only when it is thrust upon us, unwanted and despised.

When I realized that this passage was one that I wanted to explore but could barely understand, I started looking for what some other people have had to say. Sometimes, I just have no hope of conveying what I would like to, so I'm going to let them do the talking today:
And you must know that to be empty of all created things is to be full of God, and to be full of created things is to be empty of God. (Meister Eckhart)

The creative individual is particularly gifted in seeing thegap between what is and what could be (which means, of course, that he has achoeved a certain measure of detachment from what is. (John W. Gardner)

Can you cleanse your inner vision until you see heaven in every direction? (Laotzu)

The test of Christian leadership: What are we giving away? (Our pastor in a sermon this morning, on this very passage)

When one sees eternity in things that pass away and infinity in finite things, then one has pure knowledge. (Bhagavad Gita)

The desert is a place for learning to lower one's expectations almost to the point of absurdity, being content increasingly with less and less, giving up living ambitiously for lofty ends of any sort. One discovers there the importance of the simplest of means, ignoring everything else that doesn't serve the ordinary. That's how one comes, at last, to find strange comfort in the desert waste, only by embracing indifference, learning to delight in nothing so much as simplicity. Solace likes at the still point of emptiness-beyond hope, beyond proof, beyond consolation. Deliberately aiming the exercise of indifference(apatheia)at oneself, one releases little by little the anxious thoughts of the distracted ego. The false self is gradually starved by inattention. One learns also to be indifferent to others, ignoring surface impressions so as to open oneself to radically different people on the clean, level ground of unspoken humanity. No longer driven by short-lived feelings of sympathy or pity, one consistently, doggedly works for justice without thought of reward. (Beldon Lane)

He who would be serene and pure needs but one thing, detachment. (Meister Eckhart)

Serenity and purity do sound like blessedness, don't they?

A Laywman's Lectionary: Immediately? For the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time (1/23/05)

Immediately? - For The Third Sunday In Ordinary Time (1/23/05)

Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. He left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, so that what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled:

"Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali, on the road by the sea, across the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles, the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned."

From that time Jesus began to proclaim, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near."

As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea for they were fishermen. And he said to them, "Follow me, and I will make you fish for people."

Immediately they left their nets and followed him.

As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them.

Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.

Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people. (Matthew 4:12-23)[NRSV]


Immediately?

Do you do anything immediately? I don't even hit the off button on the clock radio immediately; I burrow under the comforter and wait for my husband to do it.

This passage has intrigued me for a long time. Did the disciples "immediately" leave their boats and their nets and follow Jesus? What about their wives, children, mortgages? Didn't they think about storing their nets, or selling the business? What were they going to do about their health insurance and 401(k)s?

A couple of years ago I served on a church committee to call a new associate pastor to our church. We began our meetings with prayers, readings, and discussion, and one night we spent quite some time on this passage. What did "immediately" really mean?" Did these disciples respond just as the story tells it? Any embellishment here? Or forgotten details? We knew that we wanted someone who would respond to our church's call wholeheartedly and without reservation, who would see it as Christ's call on his or her life -- but we didn't expect the response to come immediately, or overnight. In our church we talk a lot about discernment, and about the importance of understanding whether we are really called to a next step. What does "immediateness" have to do with it?

My best guess, taking the life of Jesus as a whole, is that circumstances, both external and internal, dictate our reactions. At times we are called to respond "immediately" and at other times we know that we need to wait and take stock. Certainly Jesus himself often took take away to pray before acting, and at times his own actions or words seem strangely delayed. The family of Lazurus criticizes him for not making haste to his friend's deathbed. He frequently tells his followers not to reveal what he has been up to. The events of his life unfold over time, as do ours, and the revelation of his reality continues to unfold, two thousand years later. Most things take time, at least in the universe as we humans experience it.

So what about the disiples and the immediacy of their response? For me, this year, that word, repeated twice, has to do with the attentiveness and awareness that is emphasized so strongly in the Bible. During Advent, the texts called for attentiveness to what was about to happen in the world. As Jesus' ministry begins, the same call is apparent, but the ominous tone of Advent is missing. No Jesus railing about end times to his followers,no angels appearing to young people who had thought they were just going about their daily business, no prophets ranting in the wilderness. Just a young man with an extraordinary charisma, standing on the beach and calling fishermen to a new task and a new life. I imagine the day as a sunny one, the water quietly lapping at the shore, the workers talking and laughing as the day is getting underway -- until they decide to respond to the young man on the beach.

What did they feel? A sense of urgency? A seriousness of purpose? An overwhelming internal insistence that they follow? A realization that new lives and new ends lay before them? Or were they relaxed and cheerful, thinking that they were going to pass a day or two with this new fellow and would be back at work by the end of the week? Who knows?

Perhaps it is only in retrospect that the emphasis falls on the word "immediately." Perhaps it was decades later, when the stories were finally written down, that the writers chose to emphasize the speed and completeness with which the disiples embraced their new lives, because they as writers saw what had come to pass as so dramatically distinct from all that had gone before or since. Perhaps it was only much later that the change in the circumstances of the human world was so vivid that it could only be relayed as a great drama -- because that's what it was, whether the disiples knew it at the time or not. And the call to us, with its immediacy and directness emphasized, is to be alert and aware, at all times. Regardless of what we are doing -- washing dishes, typing, writing on a blackboard, checking a heartbeat, washing down an animal -- and what we know, or don't know, we could be called elsewhere, to a new life, just like that.

A Laywoman's Lectionary: Come and See - For the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (1/16/05)

The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, "Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of whom I said, 'After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.' I myself did not know him; but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel."

And John testified, "I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, 'He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.' And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God."

The next day John again was standing with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, "Look, here is the Lamb of God!" The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus.

When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, "What are you looking for?" They said to him, "Rabbi" (which translated means Teacher), "where are you staying?" He said to them, "Come and see." They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day. It was about four o'clock in the afternoon.

One of the two who heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter's brother. He first found his brother Simon and said to him, "We have found the Messiah" (which is translated Anointed). He brought Simon to Jesus, who looked at him and said, "You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas" (which is translated Peter). (John 1:29-42) [NRSV]

Come and see.

We have to move, at least mentally, if not physically, to where Jesus is. Come.

We have to pay attention. And see.

Action and discernment.

I wish I had read this passage when I first joined my first church. As I've written before, I took that step without much forethought or understanding. Something moved me to suggest to my husband that we start attending a church, we chose one and went, and a month later were full-fledged members. It was kind of like joining a social club or organization. Nothing much was demanded, or even expected, of us.

Later, I felt critical of both myself and the church for that situation. As we were drawn into the life of the church, became part of a small group of like-minded church neighbors, served on committees and pursued educational offerings, I began to see that we were part of something huge. Something well beyond our understanding. Something to which nothing, so far as I could remember, in our brief membership classes, had even alluded. And so I was critical of myself for jumping in with both feet, and of the church for welcoming people with little knowledge of who they were or preparation for whom they were to become.
I took a long break from church. A really long break. Years. And when I returned, it was to a different church in a different denomination and, in reality, I was still taking a long break. I saw myself as engaged in a process of discernment, of spiritual awakening -- reading and writing and listening but not acting. I sat in the back, volunteered a little here and there, but mostly kept my own counsel and shied away from committment.

And then, one day, I had had enough of that and started taking the steps necessary to transfer my membership and become an active and engaged participant once again. And sure enough, as I realized to my chagrin somewhat later, I did exactly what I had done before: jumped in up to my waist without really paying attention.

In fact, I had paid so little attention to what I was doing that last fall I became highly critical of someone who had done the same thing. I was taking a graduate class on Spiritual Autobiography and one of our texts was Dorotny Day's The Long Loneliness. Dorothy Day is famous for her service to society's poor and discarded and her implacable pacifism. I didn't find much to like in Dorothy Day -- she struck me as a great lady, but not a friendly one. And I especially didn't like the way in which she converted to Catholicism, throwing herself blindly into it on the basis of a few masses and some tutoring by a nun, becoming confirmed in the church before she knew even a single Catholic layperson. My reasoning and lawyerly mind stiffened against the idea of an intelligent and insightful woman making such an impulsive and ill-informed leap into a life of faith.

Until I realized that I had done exactly the same thing.

(Not, I hasten to add, that I am comparing myself in any other way to Dorothy Day. I recognize genius when I see it and I'm not too worried that I have any hope of measuring up to hers.)
"Come," says Jesus. He doesn't "Think about it" or "Figure it out" or "Get a doctorate in theology first." He just says, "Come."

Quite and entirely by accident, both times I ahd joined a church, I had done exactly that. I had just come along, no differently than any of Jesus' orginal disciples. I had just come to where he seemed to be.

"And see." Once you get there, you have to be attentive to what you find.

And what is that, exactly? I'm stumped -- I don't know how to explain this. But when you begin to see with the eyes of Christ, things start to take on a different hue.

Don't get me wrong. I am no saint. In Catholic school we used to gossip about who was "holy" -- and I'm a realist, so I never had to contemplate being included in that group. As an adult church member, I know a lot of people who do a lot of good things for religious reasons, helping the poor, school children, the homeless. I know people who give away a lot of money. I know people who are active in politics -- in protests against the war, in the election, on behalf of gay rights -- as a result of their religious beliefs. I'm not any of those people. I am a totally average, overscheduled and overwhelmed suburban mom and teacher who can't manage to get either the Mastercard bill paid off or the kitchen floor washed. I have my fantasies about joing the Peace Corps when my children's college degrees are completed and their bills are paid, but I don't harbor illusions about experiencing a sudden infusion of energy and efficiency ten years from now any more than I expect it to happen this afternoon. So I can't talk about "doing" or "achieving." But I can talk a little bit about seeing.

Many years ago, I was out on a Christmas shopping marathon, charging down the aisles of a big-box chain toy store looking for gifts for unknown children, soon-to-be recipients of church largesse. Aisle after aisle of toy guns, military action figures, enough gear to outfit an entire National Guard Unit in plastic camoflauge and weaponry. That store looked very different to me as I contemplated celebrating the birthday of the Prince of Peace than it would have a few years earlier when Christmas was simply a major secular holiday for me. It felt like a poor place for me to be spending my money.

I have had to dig deep down into unknown territories to find a place of peace and forgiveness with respect to certain matters. (Actually, I'm lying. I'm not there yet. But I'm working on it.) Yesterday I was in a workshop in which we participants were asked to identify our favorite New Testament passage. I had no idea what mine might be and I was flipping through a Bible when it practically leaped from the page. "And Jesus said, 'There was a man who had two sons.' " The story of the Prodigal Son, the ultimate story of human forgiveness. Of course. When that story, or one like it, has come completely alive for you and you begin to understand what Jesus really meant by by mercy and forgiveness, you see things differently. Not comfortably, but differently.

As anyone who reads my other journal knows, my stepmother is very ill. Her battle against cancer has raised questions not uncommon in our society, questions having to do with quality of life, technology, and choice. Almost every person with whom I have discussed those issues describes one set of choices as "giving up." I don't see the decision to forego treatment that way at all. And I don't think that you have to have a specific religion or spirituality to conclude that the end of life, wherever it may lead, is a transition and that you are not "giving up" by coming to terms with that. You just need to see things differently. Not, perhaps, comfortably, but differently.

So, as it turns out, I was wrong to be critical of my former church for welcoming the delusionally innocent. I was wrong to think that Dorothy Day had moved too fast. I was wrong to think that you need to work out your faith before you get moving on it. You do not begin to see differently until you are in the midst of texts and preachers and friends who share that vision, until you are in a place where you can begin to practice it for yourself. Jesus know that; that's why he issued the invitation to follow him before offering a college course on exactly what that would entail. We begin simply by responding to the invitation.

Come. And see.

A Laywoman's Lectionary: Baptism - For the First Sunday in Ordinary Time (1/9/05)

Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him.
John would have prevented him, saying, "I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?"
But Jesus answered him, "Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness." Then he consented.
And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him.
And a voice from heaven said, "This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased." (Matthew 3:13-17)[NRSV]

What does it mean ~ baptism?

In my family, my nonreligious family, it apparently meant something of unvoiced significance, because we children were not baptized as babies in accordance with the usual practice of the Methodist Church. My father felt that people shouldn't get entangled with the church until they were old enough to know what they were doing, and babies weren't old enough. Young teens weren't either, as I discovered when I went through a period of wanting to convert to Catholicism while I was a junior high school student in a Catholic boarding school.

So I wasn't baptized until I was an adult, and had decided to become an official member of the Methodist church. Baptism was a prerequisite, so there I was, still pretty clueless, but doing it anyway. I can't say that I thought I was "saved" or "cleansed of my sins" or anything else approximating what people often say about baptism. I just thought I was taking the first step in a journey that was going to have a public as well as a private side to it.

One of our pastors articulated it well a couple of weeks ago when she said that baptism was an occasion for welcoming someone into the church family. I wish I had had that language on the tip of my tongue a couple of years after my own baptism, when we arranged for the baptisms of our first babies. I had hoped that my family would join us but circumstances got in the way. Months later one of my younger stepsisters, as cyncial and caustic as I had been as a teenager, asked icily, "Why would you have them baptized, anyway?" It was hard to respond in the face of her adolescent certitude that religion was for idiots, and I wish I could have just said something along the lines of what our pastor had said to me: I wanted them to be part of a church family, and baptism was the doorway. Jesus says as much, when he says that "it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness."

No doves, of course, for the rest of us. And no voice of God from the heavens, either. Or am I wrong about that? Jesus' baptism is apparently one of the few moments in the Bible when God as Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit are simultaneously present. Their concurrent appearance would seem to portend a momentous occasion, and maybe that is indeed what baptism is, even for those of us who don't recognize it at the time. Maybe it's a time when God in all of God's vastness drives a wedge into our lives and begins to take up permanent residence there -- quietly and unobtrusively, perhaps, but definitively there. Even defiantly there. God perhaps saying, "I am pleased with your existence, whether you like it or not, and whether you even know it or not ~ and this is your first step toward undertanding that."

In our church, our pastors emphasize, week after week, over and over, God's all-encompassing love for all of us. At Jesus' baptsim, at the outset of his ministry, we see God call Jesus "the beloved, with whom I am well pleased." At a baby's baptism, it's easy to see that love, too -- what could be more lovely than an innocent newborn in the arms of a parent?. But even those of us who are adults -- adults with long histories behind us -- even for us, God's love is there at baptism. Recognized or not.

A Laywoman's Lectionary: Exploring Wisdom - For the Second Sunday of Christmas (1/2/05)

Wisdom praises herself, and tells of her glory in the midst of her people. In the assembly of the Most High she opens her mouth, and in the presence of his hosts she tells of her glory:
"I came forth from the mouth of the Most High, and covered the earth like a mist. I dwelt in the highest heavens, and my throne was in a pillar of cloud. Alone I compassed the vault of heaven and traversed the depths of the abyss. Over waves of the sea, over all the earth, and over every people and nation I have held sway. Among all these I sought a resting place; in whose territory should I abide?
Then the Creator of all things gave me a command, and my Creator chose the place for my tent. He said, 'Make your dwelling in Jacob, and in Israel receive your inheritance.'
Before the ages, in the beginning, he created me, and for all the ages I shall not cease to be. In the holy tent I ministered before him, and so I was established in Zion. Thus in the beloved city he gave me a resting place, and in Jerusalem was my domain. I took root in an honored people, in the portion of the Lord, his heritage." (Sirach 24:1-12)

I'm in new territory, at least for me, this week. The book of Sirach hasn't been included in the Jewish scriptures since the first century CE and didn't make it into the Protestant Bible, so I doubt that it's ever had a public reading in my church. But it's part of the Catholic canon, one of the wisdom books of the Catholic Bible, and apparently is utilized frequently in Catholic worship. This reading appealed to me because, like the one I chose last week, it takes our focus away from the nativity stories and into to the broader world into which Christ arrived.

I recognized the figure of Wisdom, which we Protestants usually hear of only through the Book of Proverbs, But, even in readings from Proverbs, our attention is seldom directed to the fact that Wisdom, in the Bible, is characterized as a feminine figure and presence. Most Christians, despite the popularity of The DaVinci Code, are unfamiliar with feminine imagery for the Divine, and struggle to meld it with our familiar masculine conceptions of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. It's out there, but we don't know the history, don't have access to the writings, and seldom hear about it from our clergy. You have to be pretty determined to dig deeply behind popular fiction in search of the feminine underpinnings of Holy Wisdom. And that's not somehting I've had the time to do.

I wanted to know more, though, so I turned to the two chapters on Wisdom in Marcus Borg's book, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (1994). Borg writes about Wisdom in two ways: first, about Jesus as a teacher of alternative wisdom and then about Jesus AS wisdom.
In his chapter on Jesus as teacher, Borg distingishes between conventional wisdom and alternative, or subversive wisdom. I suppose that, whether we articulate it or not, this distinction is one of the first things that becomes apparent to us when we become serious students of the Bible. The conventional wisdom, the wisdom of our culture, the "this is how it's done" wisdom that tells us what to think and believe and do because that's what members of our culture think and believe and do, is what we expect to find, in church and in the Bible. What could be a more definitive and upstanding purveyor of how things "ought to be" than the local church?

And we have good reason to expect to find conventional wisdom in the church -- churches tend to reek of it. How well I remember the Valentine's Sunday when some friends of mine, mostly mothers in their thirties and in charge of the coffee hour after the service that week, decided to brighten things up with bright red tablecloths. Just before the service ended, one of the older women glanced into the parlor and reacted with horror. "What will the ladies of the church think?" she exclaimed, and within a matter of minutes had whisked china, silver, and coffeee pots off the tables so that she could replace the offending red tablecloths with the standard white ones.

Now that's conventional wisdom at work. My friends were so dazed by her dismay and speed that it was some time before one of them asked, "But aren't WE the ladies of the church, too?"
As Marcus Borg points out, Jesus stands as the purveyor of alternative wisdom. One of the first things that we notice, upon reading the Bible carefully, is how often things turn out differently from how we expect them to. And in case we don't figure out how things work, Jesus hammers it home repeatedly. The first are always last; the last are always first. The disdained and trampeled upon turn out to be the heroes. The learned are dense; the holy are, at best, confused. The right way is the way that we don't follow. Borg says that the cheif values of our culture are "achievement, affluence, and appearance," and I doubt that anyone would challenge his assessment. But those are never the values of Jesus.

And why not? Who, exactly, is Jesus? Borg offers one answer in the next chapter of his book, entitled "Jesus, the Wisdom of God: Sophia Become Flesh." Jesus is not just the purveyor of alternative wisdom; Jesus IS Wisdom herself.

I won't detail Borg's entire argument, but it's well worth reading for a better understanding of the early chuch's ideas about Jesus and of Jesus as understood by Paul and by the gospel writers. In a nutshell, Borg notes that in the Jewish wisdom writings, we often see the Wisdom Woman, or Sophia as she is known in Greek (and English). Sophia is the first of God's creations and is present with God for the rest (Proverbs). She is a creator herself, a source of life and of all good attributes of life (Wisdom of Solomon). In the gospels and in Paul's letters, Jesus is specifically connected with Sophia. Borg concludes, finally, that Jeses was "the Son of God, the logos of God, and the Sophia of God."

I'm sure, without knowing much about it, that Borg's reading is controversial. I've heard Borg speak several times, but I am sure that I have never heard a sermon on Jesus as Wisdom, or Jesus as somehow encompassing both the masculine logos and the feminine Sophia. It's interesting, though, isn't it, that a reading early in the Christian year, gives us Wisdom as God's first creation, commanded to dwell in Israel among God's honored people and heritage? The reading stands as a bridge between the nativity stories, providing an alternative view as to the identity of Jesus, and the stories of Jesus' teachings that are soon to come, in which Jesus himself will provide his alternative, subversive understanding of Wisdom. Something to think about.

A Laywoman's Lectionary: A Great Light in the Darkness - For Christmas (12/25/04)

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness -- on them light has shined.
You have multiplied the nation, you have increased its joy; they rejoice before you as with joy at the harvest, as people exult when dividing plunder.
For the yoke of their burden, and the bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor, you have broken as on the day of Midian.
For all the boots of the tramping warriors and all the garments rolled in blood shall be burned as fuel for the fire.
For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
His authority shall grow continually, and there shall be endless peace for the throne of David and his kingdom. He will establish and uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time onward and forevermore. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will do this. (Isaiah 9:2-7) [NRSV]
My favorite Christmas Story is probably Gian Carlo Menotti's little opera for children, Amahl and the Night Visitors. It was televised during my childhood, and my father once took my brother and me to a live production at the Cincinnati Symphony, when we were about nine and seven. That didn't work out so well, as my brother turned out to have intestinal flu and threw up in the middle, necessitating a return home, but I spent the rest of that December listening to the record and memorizing the score. I used to sing Amahl to myself, in my pathetically tuneless voice, as I wandered the sandy paths of a cottage resort in Florida the next spring, awaiting my father's return from his second wedding. Something about that Christmas miracle was sustaining to a child whose life was going to change yet again.

When I had children of my own, I introduced them to Amahl via a grainy VCR recording; today they, too, know at least bits and pieces of the music. And we did make it through an entire beautifully staged production a couple of years ago. Every Christmas I set aside a portion of an evening to sit in my quiet and candle-lit home and listen to the CD.

The operetta turns on the story of the Three Kings, journeying across a barren land in search of the meaning of a star. At its heart are the Amahl and his mother, living in isolation and need. He is cheerfully oblivious to the poverty that has taken from them sheep, goat, and food; she is increasingly irritated by his propensity for amusing himself with fantastical stories. She furiously sends him to bed after he has stayed out too late playing his flute, only to come inside with some of his biggest lies ever, about a star "as big as a window [that] moves across the sky like a chariot on fire."

Into the rest of the short production are packed the arrival of the kings (whom the mother at first believes to be another figment of her son's imagination); Amahl's humorous interactions with them; the musical and dancing entertainment provided by the local shepherds; the mother's longing looks at the visitors' display of wealth, which prompt one of the most hauntingly beautiful pieces of Christmas music in existence; her desperation for her son's circumstances; the revelation of the true character of the new king; and Amahl's innocent generosity, which leads to the first miracle of Christmas.

It's a simple enough story, full of whimsy, sorrow, and triumph. Overarchingly present are the great lights -- the light of the star which entrances a young child, puzzles his mother, and exerts a powerful pull on the three strangers, -- and the greater light to which it points. It is a children's opera, but it presents in an hour the entire sweep of Isaiah 9:2-7 as played out by the curious cast of characters who assemble in our imaginations each December.

"Have you seen a Child the color of wheat, the color of dawn? His eyes are mild, his hands are those of a King,As King he was born.
********
Have you seen a Child the color of earth, the color of thorn? His eyes are sad, His hands are those of the poor, as poor he was born.
Incense, myrrh and gold we bring to his side.And the eastern star is our guide."

A Laywoman's Lectionary: Do You Believe in Dreams and Angels - For the Fourth Sunday in Advent (12/19/04)

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said,
"Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins."
All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: "Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel," which means, "God is with us."
When Joseph awoke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him; he took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son; and he named him Jesus. (Matthew 1:18-25) [NRSV]

This year, for me, Advent has had an ominous feel to it.

Maybe it was that first reading, in which Jesus warned that "about that day or hour, no one knows." Maybe it was John the Baptist, with his seemingly unbalanced rants. Maybe it's the appearances of these angels, last week to Mary, in person, and now to Joseph in a dream.
Maybe it's just the stresses of the season. It seems to get harder, not easier, each year. The rampant materialism -- last December I thought that one of my friends was going to have a complete breakdown right there in the coffee shop as she described her distressed attempts to avoid all malls and stores effective immediately the day after Thanksgiving. This year, I'm her. The organizational challenges -- children moving around the globe, home from college and gone again, one in France as I write this; college applications in the mail, meaning even more airline angst next winter; parents hours away dealing with a devastatingly serious illness; a job that offers no break until Christmas Eve; a house in chaos in which, nevertheless, 30-plus people will gather for Christmas dinner.

But no -- it's not the tensions inherent in my own little life. There is agitation out there, in the cosmos, well beyond the strains here at home and those pulling our nation and planet apart. And Christmas is the beginning of the church year, the beginning of the annual cycle of trying to identify and address and reconcile those grander movements. For Joseph, they at first appear to dwell in his own little life, just as mine do for me. He's just an ordinary man, a carpenter and an observant Jew, planning to marry the young lady down the road who has turned up pregnant. He's a decent sort of fellow, so he's going to break the engagement quietly, hoping to put a stop to the gossip around the village well before it even begins. Mary will have her own humiliation to deal with, but he won't compund it for either of them.

And then an angel appears, in a dream. What do you believe about your dreams? Joseph probably knew that the other Joseph's dreams turned out to be fairly significant. Israel was saved because of those dreams. When things happen in dreams, at least in the Bible, the tensions of family and home pale in contrast to the strains suddenly illuminated in the world.
My own dreams are fairly confusing and seldom remembered, except in those awful predawn hours when I find myself frantic to get back to sleep so that I can dream up a happier ending than the tortured one that has just awakened me. I wonder if Joseph tried to alter the course of his dream.

If he did, we will never know. In the story as we have it, he wakes up and does what he has been told to do. We don't hear anything about his surprise or his unrest; we are left to imagine that for ourselves.

Did he know, somehow? Did he understand that he had been pulled away from his personal concerns, away from even the concerns of the world as he knew it? His son is to be named Emmanuel, which means "God with us" -- how terrifying is that?

No wonder he woke up. His chances of ordinary fatherhood are gone. No typically tedious arrival for this baby, no simple pleasures of teaching his craft to his son, no anticipation of a son's successes to be enjoyed from the vantage point of old age.

In an essay I read recently, the author's wife prays "for the grace of a normal day."* Looks like that's out for Joseph.

His dream is as ominous as all the other events of Advent. I have never been struck as I have this year by the incongruity between what we as a noisy and acquisitive culutre make of Advent and what the Bible actually says about it. Good things are going to happen, but in a very, very hard way.

A Laywoman's Lectionary: Reversals - For the Third Sunday in Advent (12/12/04)

My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.
His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise . (Luke 1:47-55) [NRSV].
Henry Ossawa Tanner's Annunciation 1898
The Bible is often an inhospitable place for women and yet here, after the dark insistence of the first two Sundays of Advent, is this exquisite anthem celebrating the gracious acceptance and wonder experienced by a young woman whom we would not criticize for a second had her song been instead one of fear and resistance.
The Gospel writers were, as far as we know, all men. Yet Luke finds room, again and again, to celebrate the spirit and contributions of women.
The Bible is full of people who resist God's call. Some of them murmur, "But I can't," and must be persuaded that they can. Some of them launch extended arguments with God. At least one of them has to be consumed by a whale before he gets it. And yet Mary, the least likely in a series of unlikely choices, embraces God's claim on her life without hesistation.
Mary refers to her "lowliness" and surely she, of all people, would know. Naive, unmarried, impoverished, and in something of a predicament. And yet, full of confidence that God has favored her with God's presence, bodily and spiritually.
Mary is not, so far as we know, an educated woman. Not a politician. Not a speechmaker. Not a sociologist or economist. And yet she grasps and proclaims, from the moment it is announced to her, the import of her pregnancy: the low, as always in the economy of the New Testament, will be lifted and the mighty will be, just as inevitably, laid low.
Pay attention! That is the recurring theme of Advent. Pay attention to the prospect of mystery in an isolated cave. Pay attention to the uneasy juxtaposition of material excess and spiritual poverty. Pay attention when angels show up unexpectedly.

A Laywoman's Lectionary: Advent Unease - For the Second Sunday in Advent (12/5/04)

In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.'"
Now John wore clothing of camel's hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.
But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance. Do not presume to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our ancestor'; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. "I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire." (Matthew 3:1-12 [NRSV])

There is no way to get around it; this material always sounds a jarring note prior to the Advent we like to experience, the one where we sing carols and anticipate angels and shepherds and wise men from afar. Sheep and cattle and camels, too -- no scowling tigers or lunging bears. We like to limit our Advent discord to family squabbles over fake versus real, pine versus spruce, steady versus twinkling. No vipers ands burning chaff for us, thank you very much.

But there it is, right at the beginning of the Gospel, and what are we supposed to do with it?
I always wondered about John the Baptist. I mean, he sounds quite ill. Who would listen to a man wandering around in animal clothing, crunchy locusts and honey dripping from his hands as he shouted his unique mixture of invective and ecstatic proclamation?

Years ago, I used to work downtown, and a large lady with a tamborine made frequent lunchtime sojourns up and down the block in front of a major department store, shouting the good news of salvation to all the passers-by, who studiously looked the other way. A gentleman in a suit often roamed the same block, preaching fire and brimstone at the top of his lungs. One day he walked right up to me, pointed his finger in my face, and intoned in a deep bass voice worthy of James Earl Jones, "God sees all of your secret sins!"

That was not good news to me.

I spent this past Thanksgiving week-end in Chicago with my family, and we went to see the Christmas displays at Marshall Field's. Sure enough, the Chicago version of John the Baptist inhabited the corner in front of one of the Snow White display windows. This one was a yoing man, eanestly sincere as he repeatedly insisted into a bullhorn that the oblivious shoppers needed to hear the words of the Gospel and ensure their salvation. Most of the crowd, of course, ignored him or, if forced by the crowd in his direction, turned politely away.

John is extreme, for sure, and his harsh words interject, at minimum, a sense of unease into our holiday festivities. But Christmas is an uneasy holiday. There is such a gaping disconnect between the meaning of Christmas and the endless round of shopping, decorating and partying that we try not to notice it. But there is John, to remind us.

I'm not, by nature, much of a shopper, so I think it's wise for me to refrain from criticizing people who are. I can think of few less appealing ways of spending my Thanksgiving holiday week-end than racing through stores. But we did have fun inspecting the elaborate Marshall Field's window displays and checking out the giant tree inside. In years past, we've taken kids to see Santa, attended Nutcracker and Christmas Carol productions , and made a family tradition of one big night of downtown shopping. We host a huge dinner on Christmas Day, and a couple of years we've taken elaborate trips. We could by no means be mistaken for clones of John the Baptist.

But that unease is always there. Christmas, after all, is really about Easter. And before Easter comes the ministry of Jesus, with its passionate focus on the poor and distressed. And after Easter comes Pentecost, the baptism with the Holy Spirit and fire of which John speaks, which we are supposed to use to bring Christ into the world. There's just nothing in there about maxing out credit cards to buy stacks of plastic kitchens and toy weapons.

One of my favorite Christmas songs, which I've heard only at the church I now attend, is entitled "And Every Stone Shall Cry." You can read the lyrics and listen to a portion of it here. Its haunting melody reminds us that

Yet He shall be forsakenAnd yielded up to dieThe sky shall groan and darkenAnd every stone shall cry
but also that
But now as at the endingThe low is lifted highThe stars will bend their voicesAnd every stone shall cry*

That song, I think, reflects on what we are meant to hear in the story of John the Baptist each Advent. The outrage is there, of course -- outrage over a world which persists in focusing on the glitz and the tensions of holiday preparation rather than the incarnate presence of God, and which finds expression in a concluding prediction of angry judgment. But so is the disappointment, at our sad inability to recognize that, in the economy of the Bible, the low is always lifted high.

A Laywoman's Lectionary: Keep Awake - For the First Sunday in Advent (11/28/04)

But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. Then two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left. Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour. (Matthew 24:36-44 [NRSV])

A couple of years ago, when our son was waiting to hear from college admission committees, he and I were in what might understatedly have been referred to as an attentive posture of being. We could have been more accurately described as about to explode from the volatile combination of apprehension and hopefulness. We were on constant red-alert for e-mail and snail mail, attentive to the slightest alteration in the letter carrier's schedule. And when the news finally arrived, most of it good, we had waited so long and so hard that it was actually something of a let-down.

You can't live in a state of such tense alertness for long, at least not at my age, without doing some serious damage to your heart. Of course, there are far worse situations: a hospital room where a child lies in critical condition, the front lines of a war, the smell of smoke and the crackle of flames in the middle of the night. At such times, our sensory perception goes into high gear and the little things that we would not otherwise notice become etched into our very long-term memory.

Fortunately, most of us are not required to live in such tension for long periods of time. In fact, most of the time, we are barely aware of our surroundings. How many times have you driven dozens of miles down the interstate without really knowing it? Could you tell me what you had for lunch yesterday? You know your paid your bills last month, but do you have any clear recollection of having done so? No, most of the time we are on automatic pilot, just doing what we need to do more or less when we need to do it.

It has been posited that it is precisely that automatic-pilot approach to life that will leave some of us in the breach. Today's Gospel passage has become the foundation for the Left Behind novels. In that series of a dozen or more bestsellers, the end of the world as we know it begins with the disappearance of the "saved," in the course of an ordinary day and right before the eyes of friends and family. The premise, also based on the Book of Revelation, is that those who have been "saved" in this life will, on the Day of Rapture, be called to God's side in the blink of an eye, while the rest of the sorry human population will be left to its dread fate in the ensuing conflict between the battling forces of the Christ and the the antiChrist.

They aren't pretty books. The explicitly depicted violence is revolting, but no more so than the articulated vision of a god of violence and judgement who is out to render the universe into two opposing camps. Is that really what God means to do? Does God want us to be attentive only to the consequences of our actions in the context of an ultimate judgment between good and evil? The parallel to the Biblical flood story might seem to indicate that such is the case. Certainly the fear of a final catastrophic judgment seems endemic to human nature, as evidenced by the flood stories told by virtually every ancient culture.

However, I don't think that today's passage is placed here at the beginning of Advent, completely out of context, to remind us of the potential for disaster, or even to be attentive to the possibility of an event of gargantuan proprotions, like a hurricane or tidal wave. I think it's here to remind us to be attentive to the possibility that a colossal shift in the cosmos might be hidden in the smallest and most ordinary of events: the birth of a child in a cave on the outskirts of a small town.

"Keep awake, Jesus says, years later, to his followers. "Keep awake, " we are reminded, a month before Christmas. Keep awake for what?

I will be the first to admit that I do not "keep awake" for the Gospel message, for the good news that the world, and the part each of us plays in it, has been transformed. Mostly, I do my regular stuff. I check my e-mail and I prepare my lessons. I wash the kitchen floor and clean out the litter box. I teach my classes and go to meetings, at the school where I teach and at the church where I worship. I nag my children about their responsibilties. I do the laundry and ignore the vacuuming. Occasionally I remember to give thanks, for a crisp and blue-skied morning, for a child who has navigated a rocky passage, for a student who makes a leap of achievement. Sometimes I remember to pray ahead of time; for instance, before I open my opinionated mouth. (Not usually.) But mostly I am not awake or aware to the power or even the love of Christ in my life.

Sometimes. The truth about my walking has far less to do with my middle-aged quest for fitness than with my need for such awareness, which I tend to experience, if at all, when I am moving on my feet through God's created world. I walk largely as an exercise in attentiveness. There have been many occasions when I have paused as I have circled the small lake to which I often walk, noting a migrating bird or a startling shimmer of light across water, and been aware that the passing cars are missing something important. One afternoon I crouched behind the full-grown reeds of late summer, observing three green heron siblings learning to fly. Baby down feathers still stuck out here and there from their increasingly adult plummage, and as they hopped awkwardly from branch to branch, I worried like a mother heron that they were all about to fall in. Cars sped behind me and bicylists zipped down the nearby path. I was the only human witness to that first flying lesson.

Even that level of attentiveness is hard to maintain. Most of the time, we fancy ourselves too busy for the daily mindfulness to which both Buddhism and Christrianity call us. John Kabat Zinn entitles one of his books Wherever You Go, There You Are -- a point worth noting. Most of us are usually too busy with where we think we are going to attend to where we actually are.
Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister says that "The role of religion is to bring us to an awareness of life. The role of religion is to transform the world, to come to see the world as God sees the world and to bring it as close to the vision of God as we possibly can. Why? Scripture is very clear. What God changes, God changes through us."

Part of the good news is that we are now reminded, as the earth swings on its annual orbit, to "Keep awake." We have another opportunity, every year in the longest and darkest days of winter, to wake up and pay attention.

A Laywoman's Lectionary: Presby Present

And so I stopped going to church for awhile. I stopped teaching Sunday school and serving on committees and helping to run programs. I started reading a lot and praying a lot and journaling some.

I knew I was on the right track when, after I told the head of Christian Education at our church that I wouldn't be teaching Sunday School the following year because I was going to take some time out to focus on my own spiritual life, she responded, "Well, give me a call when you get bored."

I wasn't all that keen on a church leader implying that a personal spiriutal search would become a boring enterprise. Maybe that's why, despite the energy and activity of that church, I no longer felt at home there.

A friend, who knew that I was at loose ends, suggested that we try her Presbyterian church. She told me that a new minister had just begun his tenure there, and said that he was an incredible preacher. It was actually a bit strange that I'd never been to her church; our children attended a Montessori school housed there, so I'd been to the building nearly every day for seven years. Still, I'd never been in the sanctuary. I decided to take her up on her offer.

Sure enough, fine preaching and terrific music, along with a long tradition of social justice work. The church had been in the forefront of community racial integration efforts in the 60s, a move which, I eventually learned, had cost it hundreds of members.

A lot of people, I think, when they hear the word "Christian," envision masses of religious fundamentalist political conservatives singing contemporary praise music. And that is an accurate reflection of a powerfully vibrant portion of American Protestantism. But it's not immediately apparent -- certainly not through the media -- that while our numbers may be declining, there are still thousands of congregations housed in mainline Protestant churches, listening to preachers whose education and knowledge stretches far and wide beyond the Bible and seminary, singing under the direction of well-trained and multi-talented classical musicians, and engaged in significant social action.

It took me maybe seven or eight years to switch church memberships. For one thing, I was preoccupied with some family issues and a major career change, from law to teaching. For another, I had learned my lesson -- as soon as your name in on the rolls of a church, people start to call you up and ask you to do things. So I just modeled myself on a leach for awhile. I went to worship services, taught some Sunday school, volunteered here and there, and otherwise followed on my own little tangential path. My daughter got caught up right away -- this particular church welcomes its children enthusiastically, and the music director doesn't hesitate to get them right up there in front for their little solos. I will be forever grateful to her for noticing that my little girl could sing, giving her opportunities to perform, and helping her prepare her very first audition, for a place in the Children's Chorus of our city's orchestra.
Eventually, I felt ready to make the committment that church membership implied to me. By that time, I could no longer interest anyone in my family in even accompanying me on the occasional Sunday, let along joining with me. I decided not to worry about it. If God were calling me to participate in a religious community, then I would respond. Church can look like a "family thing," but it doesn't have to be.

I admit, though, that I felt a bit out of place. I had been on a journey of several years toward a more interior life of the spirit, and that's not a process Presbyterians are known for. Presbyterians, at least the ones I know in the liberal PC (USA), tend to focus on corporate worship and social action. Many of us will readily admit to a rather dramatic level of Biblical illiteracy and even less familiarity with the great witers of the last several centuries of Christian theology, prayer, and spirituality. Our own senior pastor is a man deeply committedto a life of prayer and a journey with God, but his natural pastoral inclinations tend toward the sphere of politcal and social engagement. I had been very much interested in those kinds of matters in my previous church, but had been on a different journey for so long that I doubted whether I had really found the right place with the Presbyterians.

However, I had become part of a small group at the church that was committed to pursuing the inward spiritual journey, and in bringing it to the attention of the congregation. It's been a slow process, but with the arrival of a new associate minister in the past year, we are seeing some lively movement. I served on the committee that ultimately called her to our church, and I was there in large part as a voice for the need to hone the adult education and spiritual formation component of out church. I think that she will help us make major strides in becoming a congregation that is truly focused on both the inward and the outward journey.
Our senior pastor has been at the church for ten years, just a little longer than I have. His message has consistently and emphatically been one of God's pervasive love for all of us. He hammers home his themes of diversity and inclusiveness week after week. In a practical sense, that means that it's pretty easy for us to get from the Biblical text to committments to justice in the areas of race relations, poverty, gay and lesbian rights, education, and other areas of social concern. In a personal sense, it means that we all hear, over and over again, that God's love for us never falters in its all-encompassing presence.

As it turns out, the Presbyterian Church (USA) is a good place for me to hang out.

A Laywoman's Lectionary: Creation - For the First Sunday of Christmas (12/26/04)

Praise the LORD! Praise the LORD from the heavens; praise him in the heights!
Praise him, all his angels; praise him, all his host!
Praise him, sun and moon; praise him, all you shining stars!
Praise him, you highest heavens, and you waters above the heavens!
Let them praise the name of the LORD, for he commanded and they were created.
He established them forever and ever; he fixed their bounds, which cannot be passed.
Praise the LORD from the earth, you sea monsters and all deeps,
fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy wind fulfilling his command!
Mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars!
Wild animals and all cattle, creeping things and flying birds!
Kings of the earth and all peoples, princes and all rulers of the earth!
Young men and women alike, old and young together!
Let them praise the name of the LORD, for his name alone is exalted; his glory is above earth and heaven.
He has raised up a horn for his people, praise for all his faithful, for the people of Israel who are close to him. Praise the LORD! (Psalm 148) [NRSV]

I guess it is not so surprising that one of the lectionary possibilities for the day after Christmas is this hymn of praise to God the Creator -- an echo of the creation stories of Genesis. After all, the Gospel of John begins, not with a nativity story (those, as a commenter last week pointed out, are found only in Matthew and Luke and are quite different, one from the other), but with the famous introduction that reads "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Since one of the four Gospels begins with a re-introduction of the creation story, with Christ as its first and most central character, it's logical that one of our four lectionary choices this week is a reminder of the magnificence of God's creation. The readings from Isaiah and Hebrews proclaim the saving grace of God, and the reading from Matthew tells the harrowing story of Joseph's next dream and the flight of the tiny Holy Family to Egypt to escape Herod's murderous insanity, but the reading from Psalms enables us to indulge ourselves in gratitude for a beautiful universe.

Anyone who knows me at all knows that I try to find time every week, if not every day, to revel in the the outside world. Even though I live in an older, inner-ring suburb of an older, rust-belt midwestern city, I have no trouble finding spots of natural beauty. We are fortunate that powers-that-be of decades ago set aside vast spaces for parks, and for the 400-acre arboretum cemetry where I often walk, and that "little old ladies in tennis shoes" of only a few decades ago faced down some state visionaries dreaming of an interstate through one of our loveliest lake areas, a natural stopover for migrating birds in the spring and fall. Our city sits on the shores of one of the Great Lakes, and my New Year's Resolution, if I have one, which I guess I do now, is to find some time at least once a month to spend out on the lakefront.

This past year, I have had a considerable amount of good fortune in terms of witnessing the natural beauty of our country. I've taken long walks on the Atlantic coast and the Pacific Coast. I've trudged the dunes of Lake Michigan, walked the paths near Lake Chautauqua, and hiked in the forests and to the waterfalls of western North Carolina and western Oregon. I've been to Chicago and Portland, Traverse City and St. Augustine. I've flown 3,000 miles west and back again, and driven 1,500 miles south and north (with only one major car repair on my van with its 120,000 miles to show for it!). My report is that, despite the nasty divisiveness of the election, we live in a land of dazzling natural diversity. It makes complete sense for us to pause at this time of winter solstice, when much of nature is undergoing a process of rebirth underground and under snow, and offer our gratitude for the gift of this earth and its universe.

A few years ago, on an annual family vacation to St. Augustine, Florida, we all decided to go parasailing. As our guides took us an an extremely bumpy motoboat journey (I think they wanted to impress our teenagers with their speed and daring) over the waves and way offshore to our starting point, we passed a gannet riding the waves much more comfortably than we were. Gannets are large seabirds, seen out over the waters of St. Augustine only when driven inward by sea storms. I love their beauty -- stark white bodies with sleek black wings -- and their torpedo-like grace as they dive for fish from vast heights above the water. They don't come into shore, so the only way to view one close -up is to be out on the ocean yourself. Our guides were surprised by how thrilled I was to see what they had thought was "just some other kind of big gull."

The best was yet to come, though. I wasn't really all that confident about the whole parasailing idea. You hook yourself into a harness and the motorboat takes off, gradually lifting you 1400 feet into the air -- and heights aren't really my thing. But the flight is peaceful and the view is extraordinary. As we sailed over an ocean rolling in colors of teal, green and blue, a giant ray swam underneath us. We often see dead rays washed up on the beach, but I had never seen a live one except in the National Aquarium in Baltimore, where the exhibit of rays and sea turtles is mesmerizing. What an amazing sight that was from the air: that huge and ancient creature, with the odd shape that has served it well for 400 million years, gliding along just under the surace of the water, oblivious to the humans with whom it shares the world.

I realize that I could go on and on. Sometimes you have no idea where you will end up, when you sit down and start to write. I thought, at the beginning of the week, that I would write about the Flight to Egypt -- I have been so engrossed inthe dark and foreboding hints in this year's Advent readings. But as the week passed, I was increasingly drawn to the reading from Psalms, and now I can see why. Many of the other readings have been ominous, but they have also been about attentiveness: to signs around us, to proclamations, to angels and dreams and today, to the the natural world. We really need this time -- especially on an early winter day like this one when the sky is already darkening and huge flakes of snow are falling, with a great softness that belies the difficulties they are no doubt creating for holiday travelers -- we need this time at the end of the calendar year and beginning of the church year, to reflect on a world far beyond ourselves.

A Laywoman's Lectionary: The Methodist Years

Why were we so attracted to a church about which we knew next to nothing? The preaching was the first main thing. Our senior pastor, who turned out to be rather famous in preaching circles, had started that new year off with one of his favorite approaches: a short series on a theme. The theme arose from the book In His Steps by Charles Sheldon. Written in 1896, it was, as far as I know, the first book to ask the contemporary question, "What would Jesus do?" For four weeks, our pastor preached on the response to that question -- as it might be answered at church, in the workplace, etc. His sermons were exactly what I was looking for, as I tried to figure out how to reconcile an increasingly upscale professional life with the call of the Gospel.

For the first couple of years, we were content just to go to church on Sundays. Church as lecture and concert, I guess you could say. We didn't know anyone (there were about 1500 members, with about 400 in attendance on any given Sunday morning) and we didn't know how to get to know anyone. That changed a bit when I was asked to join a committtee, but we were still on the periphery of the community. I don't think that we really understood that there was even such a thing as a church community. In retropsect it seems a bit odd, but I gave birth to my twins and then to my daughter during that period and, while their arrival and baptisms were duly noted in ther church bulletin, no one showed up with a dinner or anything else of use.
Things began to change shortly after our daughter was born. The church beban to focus on small group development, and we found ouselves hooked up with a neighborhood group of several young families like our own. We all had small children and most of us were on our own, far from extended family support. We were starving for companionship, eager to learn about our religion, and thrilled beyond belief to have found each other. Suddenly -- community!!! In the early years, we met regularly for various Bible and other studies and began to celebrate our holidays together. As the women quit work to mother fulltime, we began to get together for conversation every week, and started going away for an annual week-end together. At the same time, we all became deeply involved in the life of the church, teaching classes, taking classes, and serving on committees and boards. Many of us took two or three of the Methodist year-long DISCIPLE Bible study classes together.

As the kids grew and moved into involved sports and activities schedules and the moms went back to work, we found it harder to get together, and some of us drifted away from the church. A couple of years ago, the moms reinstituted our weekly get-togethers -- at a coffee shop these days, where other groups of women also show up and sometimes merge with ours. The days of meeting in someone's kitchen while the children play underfoot are long gone, but more recently we have been known to settle in at the tables we pull together for breakfast at around 10:00 and on occasion decide a few hours later that we might as well have lunch, too. Most of us are pretty liberal, politically and theologically speaking, and we live in a community of unusual diversity (all of which we take for granted, except at times like the recent election). We never run out of things to talk about.

For myself, over the years I found less and less sustenance of a spiritual nature through the church itself. Ministers came and went, and the preaching waxed and waned. I got burned out on volunteering. My husband lost interest -- and it's VERY hard to keep children focused on weekly Sunday School when their dad is sitting in the kitchen reading the paper. Our family was vacationing at the Chautauqua Institution every summer, and it was to the speakers and classes at Chautauqua that I was increasingly turning for my religious life. There were a few years when the music and preaching at Chautauqua would carry me all the way through to Christmas -- I would buy the tapes of the summer lectures and church services and listen to them as I drove around all year long. (I still do.) I took at least three journaling classes there over several summers, took yoga classses in the early mornings, and bought stacks of books from the authors I heard speak.

At Chautauqua I was discovering a rich tradition of Christian spirituality, contemplation, and scholarship that was not particularly accessible through my church. Over the years, I heard, many times over, speakers such as Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister, Episcopal priests Barabara Brown Taylor (my favorite preacher on the planet) and John Claypool, religious scholar Marcus Borg, commentator Karen Armstrong, Unitarian pastor Forrest Church, rabbi and lawyer David Saperstein (and, for the first time last summer, his brother, Rabbi Marc Saperstein), environmentalist Jane Goodall.

My favorite concert ever, and as spirit-moving an event as any of the Sunday services where 5,000 people rise to sing "Holy, Holy, Holy" in an outdoor ampitheatre, was Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie in combination. You haven't lived until you've been part of that same outdoor ampitheatre crowd that will come back to worship the next morning when, late on a summer Saturday night, Pete Seeger gets you all to sing "All people That on Earth Do Dwell" in a ROUND -- all 5,000 of you!

So I was a Methdodist in form and name, but not in practice or attentiveness anymore. I was reluctant to give up my church -- the building is huge, but I knew its every nook and cranny, and the architecture and stained-glass windows are breathtakingly beautiful -- and yet, I wasn't really there anymore. We went as a family to Christmas Eve services, because we couldn't abandon the music and the candles held by hundreds of people in the dark of a cavernous cathedral at midnight, but I was gradually responding to a call from another direction.

A Laywoman's Lectionary: The Empty Years

There isn't much to say about my spiritual journey in my 20s, since I wasn't making one. I went to college -- three of them, in fact, in Massachusetts and Rhode Island -- and never set foot in a chapel or took a course in religious studies. I got married in a church, that little brick Methodist church of my childhood, but only because a tornado and torrential rains wiped out our plans for an outdoor wedding. I went back to the midwest for law school and I went to work.

Something was nagging at me, though. All those years in religious schools had taught me that my life was supposed to be one of service to others. As a child of the 60s, I did, like many of my law school classmates, have some vague and ill-defined ideas about using the law as a tool for social action, but it turned out that those kinds of jobs were few and far between, especially where I live. So I ended up in the corporate world, wearing elegant suits and making good money, taking regular business trips and eating in nice restaurants. And always, always, wondering whether I wasn't supposed to be doing something -- well, something more substantial with my life.

One day when I was in my late twenties, completely out of the blue, I told my husband that I thought that we should find a church. He was agreeable, and suggested that we check out a Methodist one a few blocks away. I was fine with that. The building had tremendous appeal -- it's built on the plan of a 13th century French cathedral.

It offered a safe trial -- the services were broadcast on weekly cable, so we didn't even have to go near the place to check it out! We liked what we saw -- great music and erudite preaching -- and so off we went, walking on a cold and sunny January morning down a narrow pathway that ran through the residential blocks between our house and the church. We had no idea what we were doing, but a month later we were official members of a large mainline United Methodist congregation.

A Laywoman's Lectionary: Education of the Head, Hand, and Heart

Next stop: a new boarding school, this one in western Massachusetts where, between high school and college, I would spend the next five years of my life. Are there many places on the planet more beautiful than the Connecticut River Valley and the Berkshire Mountains? (I'm afraid, though, that I would have to admit to having taken them largely for granted at the time.)

I had finally reached my father's objective for me: a New England boarding school of unquestioned academic reputation. Unfortunately, by the time I got there, it was the fifth of my summer camps and boarding schools in as many states, and I was exhausted from the repeated challenge of starting all over with completely new people in a foreign environment. My high school years developed into one extended period of acting out the losses of childhood and adolescence. I won't bore you with the details.

I will share some of the story from a spiritual point of view, however. You may recall that during my childhood years I had a tangential relationship to small-town midwestern Methodism, and had moved on in junior high to the mysterious ritual of the pre-Vatican II Catholic church. Suddenly, at fifteen, I found that I had landed in an entirely new religious environment.

My school had been founded in the late 1800s by a famous evangelist, whose purpose had been to provide a solid education for the young farm women of the area so that they could be trained as missionaries to foreign lands. A couple of years later, he founded a boys' school across the river, hoping to offer to young men of little or no means the rigorous education that the sons of the wealthy and prominent obtained at the famous New England prep schools.

The founder's legacy -- education of the head, hand, and heart -- left a pattern of interesting dichotomies all over our campuses. From an academic standpoint, our education was second to none. Our school was renowned across the country for the excellence of its college preparation for young women. (And no, I didn't know that when I arrived. I was fifteen, exhausted, and couldn't have cared less.)

The school also emphasized the value of manual labor. Every student had a job on campus, every day, changing positions each trimester. Sometimes I signed up for pre-breakfast preparation, wanting to get my work out of the way first thing in the morning. I can remember showering in the pitch dark and running down to the kitchen at 6:30 a.m., my long hair hanging down my back and soaking through my kitchen uniform. My favorite job was after-dinner tins -- the endless washing of pots and pans. It was a miserably difficult task, but it took so long that the tins girls could escape some of the two-and-a half hour evening study hall. Whenever I hear the song Spirit in the Sky, I think of spring evenings in the kitchen, dancing to the music as we dried off the huge cooking vats with all possible deliberation and lack of speed.

The job program was probably the reason I chose that particular school. I was given no choice about going away, but I was offered a few options in terms of destination. Most of the catalogues I flipped through featured girls in expensive clothing engaged in what looked like expensive occupations. The one I gravitated toward pictured young women in weird outfits and caps, scrubbing and sweeping and preparing food. I didn't have any more intrinsic interest in those activities than I do today, but I figured that a school where the students did real work couldn't be all bad.

And, finally...the religious aspect. Once again, something that was never discussed in my home, but became critical to my formation.

We attended daily chapel and Sunday church services and, amazingly, I usually showed up. My group of friends tended to be of a mind to skip the religious demands on our lives -- but I loved the morning chapel music and the eloquence of the speakers who visited our campus. I couldn't sing two notes in succession to save my life, but I could listen. I was astonished and mesmerized by my introduction to the Protestant tradition of religious music. While my friends were slinking out the back door of the chapel and hiding out in unoccupied buildings, I was hunkered down in my pew, soaking up the sounds of centuries of Christian organ and choral music.

I loved the speakers, too. I wasn't much of a student in those days, sticking to the subjects I liked and ignoring those I didn't, but when William Sloane Coffin showed up, I paid attention. I don't remember any specifics, but I know that to be awash in the words of the best speakers New England colleges had to offer during the 1960s was a transformative experience.
And so were words, in general. The words, astonishingly, of the Bible, and of the great religious writers of our time. We didn't just go to chapel and church. We also took religion classes as part of our regular academic schedule. Yes, just like in Catholic school -- religion every day. A year of Old Testament, a year of New Testament, and then electives.

These were not your usual high school religion classes. These were an incomparable gift. Our Old Testament class was basically a college-level survey course in the literary-historical critical analysis of the Biblical text. By the time September was half over, "JEDP"* resounded in my head and symbolized the approach that would forever after inform my aproach to the Bible. It was no longer a book of childhood mythologies and improbable miracles. It had become a puzzle, its intricately woven layers of texts challenging the intellect at every level. What a treasure trove of knowledge to hand over to high chool students! I have a friend here who was in my class at boarding school and not so long ago we smiled over those years. "JEDP!" she exclaimed. "We were so lucky! They taught us the Bible as if we were adult thinkers."

My senior year elective was called "Church and Society." We read Bonhoeffer, Freud, Frankl, and who knows who else. I still wasn't a religious person in any sense of the word but, again, my ordinary daily life was informed by the prophetic voices of our century -- in class --and of our decade -- in chapel. I was seventeen, and in an environment where I could assume that everyone grew up in the midst of the ongoing religious and philosophical discussions of the ages. Our school was mostly Protestant in theology , and mostly white in population, but its doors were wide open to every thought and question imaginable.

And, once again, it was a religion teacher who tried to open the windows to the broader world in a more pragmatic sense. My religion teacher senior year was a man from North Carolina. One morning as we walked to class through a couple of feet of snow, he asked where I was applying to college, and then began to rail against what he termed our "parochialism." Why are y'all so stuck on New England?" he asked. "Y'all should be thinking about Chapel Hill and Vanderbilt. Get out of here and find out something about the rest of the country!"

So what had I learned, by the time I was eighteen, about religion and the people who care about it? That the people who study and teach religion are often the ones who will push you onward and outward, into a vast universe of unanswered questions. That faith is a worldwide phenomenon expressed in a myriad of ways. That almost everyone of faith claims to have some hold on some kind of truth. That if there is a God, then that God seems to have numerous ways of trying to reach people. That religion can be a subject of deep and challenging intellectual inquiry. That it can be a source of illuminating joy or astounding evil. That it can be a matter of complete indifference. That it has inspired music so exquisitely powerful that if there were nothing but the music, that alone could make a believer out of someone not otherwise inclined in that direction.

I didn't yet have any idea that faith could seep into your life when you weren't paying any attention. That knowledge was to come much, much later, when I would begin to see it as the path toward a worldview of openness and curiosity and authenticity.

(*JEDP is shorthand for the four sources compiled to form what we know as the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, as posited by significant scholars of the 19th century and debated vigorously by Biblical inerrantists.)

A Laywoman's Lectionary: The Catholic Years

Picture: A scrawny twelve-year-old girl with humiliatingly nondescript short brown hair and bangs, wearing a brand new plaid jumper, a pastel blouse with a Peter Pan collar, and black flats. She is being ushered through the high-ceilinged corridors of the convent, hugely built in the mid-1800s and home to classrooms, dormitories, elegantly crafted shelves and woodwork, well-appointed parlours, kitchens, dining halls ("refectories" in convent parlance), and cloistered chambers for nuns. Her guide is a nun -- and whatever that might be, the place is crawling with them. They are all decked out in long black habits and starched white wimples (new vocabularly words for our heroine), with crosses jammed into their black belts like hunting knives and lengthy strands of black beads swaying against the folds of their skirts. (The word "rosary" is, also, as of yet unknown.) As they reach the enormous Gothic chapel,
our young lady discovers that most of the women and girls, upon entering the door, dip their fingers into a container of water and make a mysterious sign across their bodies. They kneel in the aisle and then sidle into the long pews, where they again kneel on little cushioned benches that seem to have been placed there for just such a purpose. Being sort of Methodist, our observer has never seen anyone kneel in church -- not that she has ever encountered holy water or the sign of the cross, either. But she is willing to wait things out patiently. She is only twelve, but she has encountered enough new situations in life to know that there is no point in assuming or expecting anything. Whatever happens will always be something far different from anything that could have been anticipated.

The only man in evidence, grandly dressed in long robes, is at the altar, where he lifts an enormous round gold container of sorts into the air and chants something unintelligible. Most of the crowd in the pews chants right back. Within a few moments, all is made transparently clear: nothing will ever be comprehensible again. There will be no clarification of beads, crucifixes, water, hand signs, kneeling, nuns or chants -- it turns out that every single word is spoken in Latin.

And thus I was introduced to the Roman Catholic faith. A pre-Vatican II faith, in which young women were graduated from high school and immediately entered the convent, in which priests were placed on pedestals so high you could barely see them.

What was I doing there? My father and his brothers were graduates of a high-profile New England prep school and, while he wanted the same for me, my dad was convinced that our local school system was not up to the job of preparing me (to be prepared). He knew the nuns who ran the school -- it was 20 minutes further out into the country from our home. Many girls from our community attended the nuns' school, albeit as day students. I have my stepmother to thank for getting me out of the house on a permanent basis by the beginning of seventh grade.
In other words, I had arrived at a Catholic boarding school, kicking and screaming against my forced spearation from my friends, for academic and family reasons. No one in my family seems to have given a thought to the RELIGIOUS facet of the school, which would come to permeate my daily life. I can only conclude now that my family was so areligious (not anti-religious; just oblivious to the whole concept of religion) that it never occurred to them that anyone took it seriously. Not even nuns.

Here,in a nutshell, was life in a Catholic girls' boarding school in the mid-1960s:

blue wool skirts and white blouses designed in, oh, maybe 1940;

daily religion classes, Catholics and nonCatholics segregated from one another, but both taught by nuns;

long and narrow dormitories in which we slept on beds in rows of cubicles curtained off from one another;

the Beatles, the Stones, and the Supremes blasting from deeply recessed windows in hundred-year-old buildings;

a weekly liturgical music class and a weekly choral music class;

cigarettes in the bathrooms and in the fields behind the school;

skirts rolled up to reveal several inches of thigh;

Sunday Mass, Friday Mass, and, often, several other masses;
basketball with nuns in ankle-length habits;

Saturday morning sewing classes, which I avoided by hiding out on the soccer field;

Latin, statues, holy water, medals, missals, lacy caps for entering the chapel, tattered books on the gory and self-sacrificial lives of the saints, crosses all over the place, brief periods of freedom on late afternoon horseback rides, prayers before meals and classes, slipping out and curling up in those deep window wells for late night conversations long after the nuns had gone to bed;
numerous hours devoted to the development of carefully designed plots for infiltrating the cloistered area of the buildings where the nuns lived in order to research the answer to that endlessly challenging and earth-shaking question: What kind of underwear do nuns wear?

And, since it was the 60s: the Smothers Brothers, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and Walter Kronkite.

If you watch the tv show American Dreams on Sunday nights, you can see in Meg's school some strong similarities to my own. The main difference, of course, was that we lived there, 24/7, and so it was nuns, may of them remarkably young and entirely Catholic, who filled in for parents.
I left that school after ninth grade as an agnostic at best, more probably an atheist. I had had my fill of religious indoctrination and, as a nonCatholic surrounded by medieval ritual, I emerged with a vastly enlarged capacity for skepticism. But I did make three gains that equipped me well for life:

In the first place, I became accustomed to a world in which women managed their own lives. The convent sat on acreage far out in the country and the nuns managed their farm, their convent, and their school. Men were seldom in evidence. Oh, there was a priest, but since I was not Catholic, his presence was of little significance to me. I didn't make confession or take communion or study with the upperclass Catholics, so I had virtually no interaction with him. I never had any reason to surmise that adult women were in need of male approval or cooperation for their endeavors.

Secondly, the nuns were, on the whole, particularly broad-minded women. Probably one of the most significant episodes of my entire educational career occurred when Sister Collette, who taught our nonCatholic religion class in 8th or 9th grade, decided that we would study comparative religions. An extremely young woman schooled entirely in the Roman Catholic tradition, she tried to teach us basic Catholicism, since that was what she knew. We, her irritable and difficult students, did not hesitate to communicate to her that her information conflicted with what we had picked up in various Protestant Sunday Schools. After running into several 13 and 14-year-old brick walls, she announced that she had realized that she knew nothing about religions other than her own, and so we were going to study them together. I don't remember any specifics about what we studied -- although I do know that the only Seder I have ever attended was the one we put togetherin our little pastel-painted Catholic classroom in the heart of midwestern farmland-- but I have always remembered her fearless and open-minded decision about what we should learn and how we should do it -- with respectful interest and graciousness.

Finally, I learned, without recognizing it as a life skill, to form friendships with other girls and women. I learned to see the members of my gender as reliable, trustworthy, and desirable confidants. I learned that girls and women are smart, talented, strong, funny, and hugely determined people. Year before last, I attended a reunion, and spent an afternoon with women I had last hung out with when we were 14 together. It was so easy. When you have talked with a good friend all afternoon and late into the night, month after month -- well, it's an incredible way to live asa young girl. I suppose that we were too independent of adult supervision, and too limited in our encounters with the opposite gender (not for want of trying, believe me), but we learned how to be with women. Don't misunderstand me -- I would not recommend that a twelve-year-old live away from home. But there are always compensations, and the company of strong women, whether twelve or 80 years old, is one of them.